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One of the many issues I explored in Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard was the question of John Chapman’s alleged vegetarianism. While I discovered some evidence that Chapman was not a vegetarian in his earlier years, he probably adopted a vegetarian diet later in life. In my efforts to contextualize Chapman’s alleged abstention from animal flesh, and speculate on its origins, I found an intriguing connection between Chapman’s religious disposition towards Swedenborgianism and the origins of American vegetarianism. For more on Chapman’s Swedenborgian religious beliefs read chapter four of Johnny Appleseed, or this blog post.

While Emanuel Swedenborg did not call for believers to adopt a vegetarian diet, he did portray the move toward a meat-centered diet as a symbol of man’s fall from paradise. Genesis 1:29-30 appears to endorse the idea that plants, not animals were God’s chosen food for man. Swedenborg argued that with man’s expulsion from the Garden, “man became cruel, like wild beasts, yea more cruel, first they began to kill animals and eat their flesh.” But Swedenborg did not conclude that God intended for man to abandon meat-eating. As post-Edenic man had developed a cruel nature, meat-eating was part of their fallen state, and therefore permitted.

William Metcalfe, leader of the Philadelphia Bible Christians and advocate of abstinence from animal flesh.

Swedenborg’s writings on meat-eating nonetheless inspired some of the early English Swedenborgians to embrace a vegetarian diet. This splinter group of Swedenborgians came to be known as the Bible Christians, and they migrated to Philadelphia, a city that already had an active group of meat-eating Swedenborgians, in 1817. Over time, the Bible Christians dispensed with their Swedenborgian identity, and abstinence from both animal flesh and alcohol became their defining creed.

I of course was eager to determine whether Chapman’s probable shift to vegetarianism late in life was inspired by his reading of Bible Christian literature. It was impossible for me to establish any direct connection, but we know that Chapman was a voracious reader, and especially attracted to books and pamphlets on religious subjects. Furthermore, the Swedenborgian literature he freely distributed on the Ohio frontier he acquired from Philadelphia Swedenborgians. Chapman may have independently settled on a vegetarian diet after reading Swedenborg’s explanation of man’s fall.

Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard was late in the production stages when I learned that historian Adam Schprintzen was completing The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817-1921. In that book, Schprintzen identifies the Philadelphia Bible Christians as the progenitors of a proto-vegetarian movement in the United States. I reached out to Dr. Schprintzen and he eagerly answered my questions about the Bible Christians and their connection to the Swedenborgian movement. When the Vegetarian Crusade was published, I immediately ordered a copy and read it.

The Vegetarian Crusade is an important book, and does an excellent job explaining the origins of American vegetarianism and its evolution across its first century. It should be on the bookshelf of every scholar of antebellum American history. Schprintzen sets the early movement in the context of antebellum reform. Early advocates of abstinence from meat, like all reformers of the era, understood their actions as part of a greater movement to improve society, to cleanse it from its sins, and for some, to help usher in Christ’s millennium. They drew connections between their movement and other reforms–non-violence, anti-slavery, women’s equality, and health to name just a few. Schprintzen does an excellent job explaining these connections in the years before the Civil War and in helping us understand the beliefs of these proto-vegetarians.

But that is just the first part of the Vegetarian Crusade. Schprintzen offers his readers much more that that, mapping out a clear and persuasive narrative explaining how we get from this antebellum proto-vegetarians to modern vegetarianism. That narrative introduces us to nationally-famous health reformer Sylvester Graham, a campaigner against white bread and advocate of a high fiber but bland and meatless diet, the emergence of the American Vegetarian Society in 1850, and explains how the Civil War and the post-war commercialization of a vegetarian diet by John Harvey Kellogg and others in the late 19th and early 20th century. It has been my intention to write a thorough review of Vegetarian Crusade and post it on this blog. Perhaps I will eventually find the time to give this excellent book the thorough review it deserves, but in the meantime, I’d like to point you to a place where you can learn more.

This week podcaster Liz Covart released an episode of her Ben Franklin’s World podcast that is a conversation with Adam Schprintzen, author of The Vegetarian Crusade. If you are not familiar with the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, now is the time subscribe and start listening. Every week Covart interviews an author of a recent book on Early American History. These are extended and lively conversations about important books. I can’t think of a better way to quickly get yourself caught up with the most important new scholarship on Early American History than listening to Ben Franklin’s World. Covart’s conversation with Adam Schprintzen is the 44th interview to appear on Ben Franklin’s World in just the first year of the podcast. Ben Franklin’s World just surpassed a quarter million downloads, and has been picked up by Spotify as well. Start listening to it now so you can say, “I was listening to BFW back when only the coolest people knew about it.”

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Richard Townsend arrived in North America with the first group of Quaker colonizers to Pennsylvania. According to one Bucks County legend, when the local Lenni Lenape Indians found him setting out fruit trees in his private orchard, they told him about a giant apple tree that grew not far from his new homestead. Curious, Townsend asked his Indian neighbors to lead him to the site, and was surprised to find ““an apple tree in an Indian clearing, vastly larger than any seen in England, heavily loaded with larger and better apples than he had ever seen before.” Perhaps the tree, which appeared to be an Old World variety, had been planted intentionally or otherwise by Native Americans who had acquired apples from Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam. Townsend asked the Indians to sell him the land on which the mysterious tree stood. The Indians agreed to sell him the land on the condition that the tree remain available “for the free use of all who wanted apples,” a condition Townsend accepted. According to this legend, the tree survived until 1792, 107 years after Townshend first encountered it.

The story highlights a fundamental difference in the way Native Americans and Europeans viewed perennial fruit trees. For the Lenni Lenape, fruit hanging from a branch could not be “owned” by an individual, nor could an individual claim private ownership of the tree from which it grew. Ownership came with the act of harvesting. As Europeans remade the North American landscape, they also rewrote the rules of property which applied to that landscape, and the radical idea of “public fruit” essentially disappeared.

In recent years, the radical idea of public fruit has gained new currency, and in cities

Losa Angeles-based fruit and art collective Fallen Fruit

across America, volunteer organizations like The Philadelphia Orchard Project, the Boston Tree Party, the Portland Fruit Tree Project and Seattle’s City Fruit have been planting urban orchards or taking on the responsibility of caring for and harvesting fruit from already existing urban trees. The public fruit movement achieved another milestone recently when the Los Angeles based collective, Fallen Fruit, which has been producing maps of publicly accessible fruit for years, opened the city’s first public fruit garden.

Janet Owen Driggs makes the case that Los Angeles’ new public fruit park is radical, in part because it reverses laws in place in cities across the nation through much of 20th century which actively banned fruit-bearing trees on pubic land. Driggs explains that “the legal basis for the prohibition lies instead with the doctrine of attractive nuisance: a tort in common law by which a landowner may be liable for injuries inflicted on an ‘infant trespasser’ by an object or condition appealing to a child, when the landowner could reasonably foresee the potential danger. Examples include: an unfenced swimming pool, a cute-looking dog with a propensity to bite, and, apparently, a fruit-laden tree.”

The fruit tree prohibition that descended upon American cities in the 20th century may have found justification in the legal idea of “attractive nuisance,” but it also reflected other concerns. Many urban planners privileged sterile or male trees for urban spaces because they did not produce “fruit litter,” and public fruit trees also sparked the general American anxiety about shared resources. Who would care for the trees? Who had “rights” to harvest them? How much fruit could one harvester legitimately take? Fallen Fruit’s new Del Aire Fruit Park may be a sign that things re changing. After a century in which Americans became more divorced from the production of food they consumed, the desire to bring food production back into the spaces where people live work and play is growing. The Drigg’s essay is worth reading in full: Fallen Fruit and the ‘Thin Edge of the Wedge.’

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Virginia planter William Byrd was not impressed with his North Carolina neighbors. Traveling through North Carolina in the early 1720s on a mission to survey the boundary between the two colonies, Byrd griped about the irregular supply of alcoholic beverages in the colony. Byrd believed the shortage of alcohol in North Carolina was not the result of any moral qualms about drinking but rather a consequence of the improvidence of its early settlers. When it was available, North Carolinians drank imported rum in great quantities, and generously shared it, but these periods of plenty were frequently interrupted by periods of scarcity, when it was hard to find a drop. Apple and peach orchards might have obviated these irregularities in the alcohol supply, providing the ingredients needed to make cider and cider brandy, but it appeared to Byrd that few North Carolinians had bothered to plant them. He attributed this oversight to lack of industry and foresight, particularly among the common planters, whom he called “Improvident People, who take no thought for the Morrow.” But Byrd did acknowledge that their might have been one other hindrance to the development of orchards in North Carolina. It appears that massive flocks of the once abundant but now extinct Carolina Parakeet descended upon the colony’s orchards in the summer. The birds “bite all the Fruit to Pieces in a moment, for the sake of the Kernels. The Havock they make is so great, that whole Orchards are laid waste in spite of all the Noises that can be made, or Mawkins that can be dresst up to fright ‘em away.”

The Carolina Parakeet was not a parakeet at all, but North America’s only indigenous parrot. Despite Byrd’s belief that they were only a threat to North Carolina’s orchards, the Carolina Parakeet was climate hardy, had a quite diverse diet, and a wide geographical range. It could be found in forest lands as far north as New York, and as far west as the Mississippi valley. A gregarious creature, Carolina Parakeets traveled in flocks often containing five hundred or more birds, fed itself on the seeds and nuts of the forest, and nested in the cavities of hollow trees.

In the first two centuries of English colonization in North America, Carolina Parakeets and were abundant, but populations began to plummet in the second third of the nineteenth century. Sometime in the early twentieth century, the Carolina Parakeet became extinct. Byrd was not the only observer to comment on the Carolina Parakeet’s habit of destroying an orchard full of fruit in short order. In 1831, John James Audubon noted that it:

eats or destroys almost every kind of fruit indiscriminately, and on this account is always an unwelcome visitor to the planter, the farmer, or the gardener. . . They assail the Pear and the Apple-trees when the fruit is yet very small and far from being ripe, and this merely for the sake of the seeds . . . they alight on the Apple-trees of our orchards, or the Pear-trees in the gardens, in great numbers; and as if through their mischief, pluck off the fruits, open them up to the core, and, disappointed at the sight of the seeds, which are yet soft and of a milky consistence, drop the apple or pear, and pluck another, passing from branch to branch, until the trees, which were before so promising, are left completely stripped, like the ship water-logged and abandoned by its crew, floating on the yet agitated waves, after the tempest has ceased.

Do not imagine, dear readers, that all these outrages are borne without severe retaliation on the part of the planters. So far from this, the Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from stacks, the husbandmen approaches them with perfect ease and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly around for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The guns kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours . . .

Other observers also noted that the close bonds Carolina Parakeets formed with others in their flock made them easy prey for an angry farmer. The ease with which farmers slaughtered the grieving birds was no doubt one factor in their extinction, but does not completely explain their disappearance. While stories of their dramatic and rapid destruction of orchard fruit were frequently repeated, they were not so common that they constituted the orchard’s greatest natural threat. And many farmers recognized the Parakeets value in helping rid his land of another pest. The poisonous cockle-bur, which invaded farm fields and sometimes killed livestock was among the Parakeet’s favorite foods, and no farmer minded when the Parakeets rid his field of them.

Habitat destruction may have played as great a role as the farmer’s gun, as fields and orchard replaced the forests in which the birds nested. The Carolina Parakeet may have also suffered from new competition for nesting sites with the arrival of an insect colonizer, the European honeybee, which filled the hollows of many potential trees with honey and honeycomb. Other factors which also contributed to its demise include the demand for hats decorated with dead birds which became all the rage near the end of the 19th century, and the last of the birds may have been felled by disease they picked up from domesticated poultry. In the end, Euro-American husbandry practices appeared to be a greater threat to the Carolina Parakeet than it was to the farmer’s orchards.

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Over the last decade, the United States has experienced a cider renaissance, with new craft cider makers coming on the scene in virtually every region of the nation. Today’s craft cider makers are making extraordinary efforts to produce fine single variety and blended ciders, and their efforts are paying off. As an American historian, and someone who delights in both eating and drinking apples, the rebirth of American cider is an exciting time. From the early colonial period, throughout the first half of the the 19th century, Americans consumed great quantities of cider. But if the truth be told, American cider in these early years was not always top quality. European visitors often wrote disparagingly of America’s early cider makers, claiming that they often pressed half rotten and worm-eaten apples, and were haphazard in the way they monitored the fermentation process. Quantity, not quality, appeared to be the over-riding value for many American cider makers, and most of the cider was consumed at home or bartered locally. But cider was cheap and widely available, and had earned a reputation as the common man’s drink. It is perhaps no surprise then, that in an age of rising populism in politics, hard cider would emerge as the symbol of a candidate courting the common man’s vote.

The election campaign of 1840 was a watershed moment in American politics. Voter turnout among eligible voters reached an all-time high, with nearly 80% of those eligible casting their vote. It also represented an opportunity for the relatively new Whig party to finally gain control of the White House. Since his election to the Presidency in 1828, Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party had dominated American politics by successfully presenting itself as the party of the common man. But in 1840, the nation was still plunged in the depression brought on by the financial Panic of 1837 and voters were discontent. The dangers of a unpredictable national market rekindled a bit of nostalgia for the “simpler times” of the frontier, self-provisioning farms, and local trade among many voters, and in 1840 the Whig Party was ready to exploit this nostalgia. After settling on old war hero William Henry Harrison for their presidential candidate, the Whigs were handed an opportunity when a Democratic newspaper, suggesting that Harrison was too old to run for president sneered, “Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of his ‘sea coal’ fire, and study moral philosophy.”

Harrison supporters seized on the log cabin and hard cider elements of the insult to suggest that Democratic President Van Buren and his supporters were elitists who disdained the lifestyle of the simple self-provisioning, cider-making and cider-drinking farmer.

Pull the tab and Van Buren is unhappy to find his fancy champagne replaced with common cider.

One Harrison campaign souvenir was a paper card with an image which changed when a tab was pulled on the bottom. The first image the viewer encountered was of an aristocratic-looking Van Buren, smiling as he sipped fancy “White House Champagne” from a goblet. Once the tab was pulled, the goblet was replaced with “an ugly mug of log cabin hard cider,” Van Buren’s eyes rolled up into his head, as he made the familiar “bitter beer face” expression. The message was clear: this guy thinks he’s too good to drink what you and I drink. Don’t vote for him!

Harrison’s supporters declared their man to be the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate, a perverse political twist on many levels. Far from being born in a log cabin, Harrison was born on a James River plantation, a descendant of one of Virginia’s elite, slaveholding families. Even most of his days as a military officer in the West were spent at Grouseland, a magnificent estate, surrounded by grafted fruit trees and gardens, which he had built in Vincennes during his time as governor of the Indiana territory. In a more transparently ironical way, Harrison supporters built old fashioned log cabins on the decks of modern steamboats and powered from town to town to win votes for their hard cider drinking hero.

While the “hard cider” meme went over quite well with ordinary voters, it threatened to alienate one of the Whig Party’s most loyal interests: the temperance movement. Temperance reformers had been working to eradicate cider orchards since the late 1820s, and they threatened to abandon the party for promoting alcohol consumption.

The Temperance movement’s take on the Hard Cider Campaign

“Intemperance has become the badge of a political party!” harrumphed the New York Evangelist. “Yes, intelligent men–men who have enjoyed the benefits of Christian teachings–and who live in a land of gospel light–are called upon to exhibit their enthusiasm for political strife, by drinking hard cider, made harder by hard brandy, for the Glory of General Harrison!” The Evangelist predicted that “more than ten thousand men will be made drunkards in one year by this hard cider enthusiasm.” A writer in another New York paper, declaring it “a burning shame that the flag of my country waves over such mockery and abomination, as though her stars and stripes were not insulted by being associated with such iniquity,” issued a warning to the Harrison campaign. Should these grog-dispensing log cabins be opened on “Sunday, either day or night,” the Whigs would lose the votes of so many temperance men that it would negate the effect of this pandering.

But however much the log cabin and hard cider campaign exasperated temperance Whigs, the strategy worked. Americans, troubled by the economic malaise that had fallen upon the country in 1837, embraced a nostalgia for a simpler time when their fates were not tied to mysterious market forces beyond their control. Log cabins and hard cider were a perfect symbol of that lost past. Hard apple cider represented not just a celebration of the disappearing self-provisioning lifestyle, but it was also a protest against do-gooder moral reformers bent on telling ordinary people how to live and what to drink. It did not seem to matter that the Whig Party’s soft money, pro-development economic policy promised to accelerate the market revolution, or that those moral do-gooders were most commonly associated with the Whig party. This was political triangulation at its finest. Voters were won over by the celebration of the seedling apple orchard and its homegrown product. And it worked. Harrison defeated Van Buren handily.

Van Buren being chased by a flying barrel of hard cider.

The campaign may well have proved to be a curse for hard cider, however. As the economy improved after 1843, nostalgia for “the olden days” quickly faded, and the 1840 campaign had pretty thoroughly linked cider with those old, primitive ways. As German immigrants flooded into North America, many established breweries, and beer, not associated with those unrefined frontier days, began to replace cider as the beverage of choice. Today’s craft cideries may finally be undoing the damage done by the Whig Party and their “hard cider campaign.”

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The latest issue of Inside Jersey Magazine has a nice article by T.J. Foderaro about the new American hard cider craze. Mr. Foderaro called me up early this summer and we had a nice conversation about the history of hard cider in America. I was pleased with the article, and that Mr. Foderaro was willing to help me explode the popular myth that it was 1920s-era prohibition that was the cause of hard cider’s demise.

This myth is in part the result of a common confusion about the history of anti-alcohol movements in the United States. A popular temperance movement emerged in the 1820s, and quickly gained ground, but most early supporters of that movement embraced a strategy of moral suasion, not prohibition, believing alcohol abuse to be a sin, and seeking to give the sinner the opportunity to repent and save themselves, rather than denying the sinner the possibility of redemption by using the force of law restrict access to alcohol. Many early advocates of temperance even drew a distinction between distilled spirits, and the milder levels of alcohol in cider, beer, and wine, and simply urged people to stay away from demon rum, whiskey, and other potent forms.

Carrie Nation may have used her axe on a number of saloons, but she can’t take credit for the demise of the cider apple.

To be sure, from the outset one wing of this early temperance movement, often described as “ultras” opposed the consumption of alcohol in any form, and some embraced a strategy of using the force of law to prohibit production and sale of alcohol. By the late 1820s, stories circulated about temperance advocates chopping down their own seedling orchards, as the apples which grew on this tree were the prime source of hard cider and cider brandy. (I discuss that early war on the cider apple in this post.) But evidence that widespread, temperance-motivated destruction of “wild apple” orchards is slim.

After the Civil War the anti-alcohol movement gained strength, promoted by groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement which adopted a campaign for legal prohibition. That movement claimed victory with the ratification of the 18th amendment in 1919. Long before that time, beer had eclipsed hard cider as the popular choice of Americans who chose to imbibe.

So what led to the mid 19th century demise of hard cider? It is my contention that it faded with the frontier. Unlike today’s popular craft ciders, most early American cider was a homemade hodgepodge of any available apples, dumped into the press in any condition. It was the poor man’s drink. In 1840, when William Henry Harrison ran a successful populist campaign for the presidency, he employed the log cabin and hard cider as symbols of his fictionalized common roots. (I examine that story of that campaign in this post.) By the middle of the 19th century, as Americans increasingly embraced the modern, a new wave of German immigrants offered them the alternative of beer brewed in state of the art breweries, and hard cider faded from the scene.

Apples continued to be an important part of American agriculture, however and regional, national, and transatlantic markets for American dessert apples began to grow by the end of the century. By that point cider orchards had mostly disappeared, swallowed up by returning forests in regions like New England, or in some cases grafted to produce sweet apples. (One minor error in Mr. Foderaro’s otherwise excellent article is the implication that dessert apple market didn’t begin taking off until after prohibition.)

The entire article is well worth reading. I’ve excerpted the first few paragraphs and added a link to the full article:

In case you haven’t noticed, Americans have rediscovered a taste for fermented apple juice, aka hard cider. Cider sales have grown about 100 percent annually for the past few years, and new brands — both domestic and imported — are proliferating on store shelves.

And yes, I did say “rediscovered.” Much has been made of our Founding Fathers’ taste for rum imported from the Caribbean and fortified wine shipped from the island of Madeira. But the fact is that locally made hard cider was the alcoholic beverage of choice for most Americans during the first couple hundred years of our country’s existence.

There were as many different styles of cider as there were varieties of apples — which is to say hundreds. Many growers boosted the alcohol level of their ciders by setting barrels out to freeze in the late fall, Kerrigan says. The ice that formed on top was mostly frozen water, leaving a higher level of alcohol in the remaining liquid. The more alcohol, the less prone the cider was to spoilage.

Truth be told, though, most of the cider made back then was of poor quality. According to Kerrigan, visiting Englishman often would comment on the sorry state of Colonial cider-making.

But that only partly explains why hard cider all but disappeared from the American scene by the late 19th century. Historians continue to debate the reasons for cider’s demise, but Kerrigan believes it’s rooted in Americans’ newfound sense of progress, modernity and industry. Then, following the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, waves of German immigrants introduced America to beer.

“Beer was made in breweries, which are like factories — they’re modern,” Kerrigan says. “Beer seemed cleaner and a more efficient, modern drink.”

So much so that, even before Prohibition, Americans had all but stopped making and drinking hard cider. Continued . . .

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I created American Orchard in the wake of the publication of my book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard (Johns Hopkins, 2013), and envisioned it as a place to share stories and excerpts from the book, as well as many of the interesting tangents and stories which were excised from that book as I sought to preserve a more focused narrative. In the year and a half since the publication of Johnny Appleseed I have continued to explore themes related to apples and other orchard crops, but have felt constrained by the original subtitle of this blog: “A blog about eating, drinking, sharing, and stealing apples.” I am excited about my next project, a more comprehensive history of the apple in America, which will be unconstrained by the narrative of one man’s life (and trajectory of his myth in this afterlife) and allow me to explore more broadly the role orchard agriculture has played, and continues to play in this history of the United States, from northern New England to the Southern Hill Country, as well as from the highlands of New Mexico to the high plains of eastern Washington. Furthermore, as a professor at a small liberal arts college, it is neither my purview nor desire to constrain my historical interests too narrowly, so I intend to explore subjects pertaining to my broad teaching fields in American History, especially American Environmental History in American Orchard version 2.0. The new subtitle, “Historical perspectives on food, farming, and landscape,” will serve as the new broader boundaries of this blog,and I look forward to sharing with you perspectives and insights that come from my research as well as the material I am teaching in my classes. I am currently working on a chapter on the transformation of the apple industry in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the early decades of the twentieth century, so questions surrounding orchards and labor are foremost in my mind, which explains the picture I am currently using for a header. But expect to find more than just apples on this blog. I intend to write about Americans’ relationship with trees, both wild and cultivated, about changing American diet and foodways, about the ways in which capitalism continues to transform food production, and controversies over pesticides, genetic modification, and globalization, often, but not always, using the orchard fruit industry as a lens for viewing these issues.

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I recently noticed a tree on my campus which appeared to be near death. At its top bare branches stretched skyward, with just a few putting forth immature and sickly-looking leaves. Around its trunk a thicker cluster of leaves had formed, which I first assumed were from an opportunistic vine, but were in fact new branches coming up at its base. When I asked the director of the University physical plant about the tree, he told me that it was one of ten Ash trees on campus that have fallen victim to the Emerald Ash Borer, an Asian beetle which arrived in North America a little more than a decade ago, and has been wreaking havoc on indigenous Ash Trees across the Midwest. The thick knot of foliage around its trunk was this Ash tree’s desperate attempt at survival, pushing out new life from any part of its body not yet fully comprised by the shiny green beetle.

This tiny D-shaped hole is made by the Emerald Ash Borer as it enters and leaves the tree.

Upon closer inspection of this tree and two others I found, I could see the signs of the beetle’s presence: tiny D-shaped holes the beetle made as it entered and exited the tree, and in places where the bark had been removed, the squiggly lines left behind as the larvae ate through the tree.

The Emerald Ash Borer arrived in a cargo container from Asia at the port of Detroit in 2002, and has begun rapidly transforming the American canopy, first attacking Red and Green Ash, then, once those are no longer available, moving on to the White Ash. The arrival in North America of this attractively iridescent green beetle is just the latest chapter in the long story of the Columbian Exchange, a term scholars use to describe the consequences of the arrival of animals, plants, and pathogens carried intentionally or accidentally from one place to another as a result of human migration and global capitalism. Columbus gets the credit, or the blame,

The Emerald Ash Borer is a strikingly beautiful murderer.

because it was in the wake of his 1492 crossing from Europe to the Americas that human contact between once isolated regions became steady, and the environmental consequences of that reality began to play out in rather dramatic ways. The expansion of global capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st century has only accelerated ecological exchanges which have been going on for over 500 years. Any plant, animal or pathogen which has the potential to thrive in an eco-region different from its native one is already thriving there, or eventually will. We cannot reverse the consequences of this new ecological reality, only seek to manage them.

The demise of native tree species perhaps receives more notice and provokes more regret and nostalgia than other Columbian-exchange induced extinctions. Just southeast of the village of New Concord is a sharp rise that some of the oldest residents of the village call Chestnut Hill, once a popular romantic and isolated picnic site where students seeking to escape the social strictures of a Presbyterian campus retreated with their dates. Today it contains no majestic Chestnut trees, which all succumbed to an imported fungus in the first half of the twentieth century. Late nineteenth century photos of the town of New Concord reveal a Main Street cooled by the shade of American Elms arcing gracefully over the road. These, too, have vanished, the victim of another invader: Dutch Elm disease.

White Ash is hard put slightly pliant, and lighter than other Ash woods.

If indigenous Ash trees disappears from our lawns, our forests, and our landscapes, will their absence be noticed? The Ash tree does not have the majesty of the mighty oak, and I suspect if you were to ask someone to name the types of trees in their local forest, it might get left off their list. For much of the year the Ash goes unnoticed, late to leaf out, and not a prodigious producer of mast. But in the fall the bronze and mauve leaves of the White Ash are among the most striking of the season. Mostly, however, American Ash trees have been simply useful trees. George Washington called the Black Ash the Hoop Tree, as its strong but pliant wood made very good barrel hoops. Many 18th and 19th century rail fences were made from the Red Ash, and Green Ash was often converted to canoe paddles. The White Ash remains prized most of all, for a wood that is both strong and relatively light. It continues to play a central role in the American pastime, as the Louisville Slugger and virtually all high quality baseball bats are made from the White Ash tree. All of these trees are now threatened by the invasion of the Emerald Ash Borer.

My go-to book for information about local trees.

Whenever I want to learn about a local tree, I pull Donald Culross Peattie’s A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America off my shelf first. First published in 1948, I am sure it has been scientifically superseded by many other volumes. I am nonetheless drawn to its lyrical prose. The author was no mere scientist, but clearly a tree lover. Peattie declared the American White Ash to be “Nature’s last word,” and fittingly placed his description of it at the very end of the volume. Written more than half a century before anyone in North America was thinking about the Emerald Ash Borer, his last words on the tree are a fitting tribute, but hopefully not an epitaph:

How many thousand-thousand of untold Ash trees are the respected companions of our doorways, kindliest trees in the clearing beyond the cabin? No one can say. But this is a tree whose grave and lofty character makes it a lifetime friend. White Ash has no easy, pretty charms like Dogwod and Redbud; it makes no over-dramatic gestures like Weeping Willow and Lombardy Poplar. It has never been seen through sentimental eyes, like the Elm and the White Birch. Strong, tall, cleanly benignant, the Ash tree with self-respecting surety waits, until you have sufficiently admired all the more obvious beauties of the forest, for you to discover at last its unadorned greatness.

William Kerrigan is the Cole Professor of American History at Muskingum University, and the author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard, which tells the story of the old world apple in America, from its arrival half a millenium ago to the present.

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Between May 13 and May 23, 2013, I co-taught a study tour of Civil War battlefields with a colleague. While this was the sixth time I have offered this study tour for undergraduate students, I decided at the outset that I would use this opportunity to gather information about orchards on Civil War battlefields. I was aware of the “famous” peach orchard where many men died on the field at Gettysburg, and was aware of a few other references to battlefield orchards, but was surprised at the abundance of information I uncovered on the eleven day trip. This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on orchards and the Civil War.

The first time I encountered the Stonewall Jackson Apple it made sense to me. It was about six or eight years ago, on the last day of my biennial Civil War study tour, and we had already visited almost every Jackson shrine and monument Virginia had to offer. It was during the tour of Stonewall Jackson’s home in Lexington, Virginia, that a strange thought popped into my head: “This guy is a little bit like Johnny Appleseed.” The comparison, on the face of it, seems absurd. Stonewall Jackson was a fierce and unrelenting warrior, celebrated for his battlefield victories; Johnny Appleseed was remembered for his gentleness and his pacifism, and a respect for life that ran so deep he was loathe to kill even a mosquito. The two men were not even of the same generation. John Chapman was fifty years old and planting apple trees on the northern edge of the Ohio Valley when Thomas Jackson was born on its southern boundary in Clarksburg, (now West) Virginia. Both have been elevated to sainthood by people in their respective regions. But the similarity stops there. Maybe.

This apple barrel stencil at the Belle Grove plantation is evidence of the commercial importance of apple growing on that Shenandoah Valley farm.

The Stonewall Jackson Apple can be found in Winchester, Virginia, at the lower (northern) end of the Shenandoah Valley. And the artist who painted Stonewall Jackson’s visage on a giant apple probably didn’t intend to make a Johnny Appleseed association. He was simply combining two things for which Winchester is known: Stonewall Jackson and apples. Jackson’s time in Winchester was brief, but it was at the height of his fame. He used a home in Winchester as his headquarters in 1862, while he engineered a brilliant military campaign driving Union forces out of the Valley and threatening to bring the war into the North. That headquarters and brief residence is now one of Winchester’s more popular tourist destinations, and has been a regular stop on our Civil War study tour.

Statue in front of the Johnny Appleseed Restaurant, New Market, VA.

Winchester’s association with the apple predates the Civil War. The Shenandoah Valley was Virginia’s richest apple-growing region in the mid-19th century, and while the Valley’s fertile fields earned it the nickname “The Breadbasket of the Confederacy” during the war, it might have also been called “The Orchard of the Confederacy,” because tree fruit was another very successful crop. The Belle Grove Plantation, which sat in the middle of the Cedar Creek battlefield in 1864, has re-established a small heritage apple orchard and also has on display the apple barrel stencil used by Bell Grove’s planters in the 19th century. The Valley’s orchards were no doubt plundered by Sheridan’s marauding armies during the Fall of 1864, but they survived the war more or less in tact, and apples continued to be an important valley crop all through the next century. New Market, Virginia, further up the Valley still has a Johnny Appleseed Restaurant, and Winchester has been hosting an annual Apple Blossom Festival for about ninety years. While there is no real evidence that John Chapman ever visited the Valley, like most of the nation’s apple-growing regions it nevertheless still has a few of its own Johnny Appleseed legends.

The similarities I found between Stonewall and Appleseed had less to do with the actual men than with their myths. In my essay, “The Invention of Johnny Appleseed,” and also in my book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard, I argue that the Johnny Appleseed legend largely took form during the Victorian era, and as a result reflects that era’s values and obsessions. So I was pleasantly surprised this year when we stopped at the Stonewall Jackson House in Lexington, Virginia and I stumbled across a fascinating and relatively new book by Wallace Hettle titled Inventing Stonewall Jackson. Hettle explores the myth of Stonewall from many angles, and I cannot do justice to his sophisticated and nuanced argument in this blog post. But Inventing Stonewall Jackson affirmed for me that some of the most prominent features of the Stonewall myth emerged in the Victorian era.

Stonewall Jackson foam stress-relieving lemons are available in the gift shop at his Lexington, VA home.

Despite the profound differences in the way these two men lived, there are at least three prominent elements of their myths–each celebrated by Victorians–that Stonewall and Appleseed share: eccentricity, piety, and domesticity. Jackson’s penchant for sucking on lemons and holding one arm straight up in the air as he rode on his horse are two stories which are still told today, and Appleseed of course is remembered for his peculiar eating habits, dress, and penchant for going barefoot in even the worst weather.

Popular Civil War Artist Mort Kunstler depicts a farewell scene with his beloved wife, in front of the Winchester home that served as his headquarters.

Jackson’s deep and very public faith is a central feature of his legend, and his death in battle has made him a Christian martyr to many. Rosella Rice, one of Appleseed’s most important hagiographers in the late 19th century, also sought to present him as a martyr of sorts, declaring that “His bruised and bleeding feet now walk the gold-paved streets of the New Jerusalem, while we so brokenly and crudely narrate the sketch of his life— a life full of labor and pain and unselfishness; humble unto self-abnegation . . .”

Finally, despite the fact that Stonewall left his family to take up the sword, and Chapman was a life-long bachelor, the Victorian hagiographers of each man threaded domestic virtues into each man’s story. Stonewall, we are constantly reminded, was a devoted husband and had special affection for children. Appleseed shared that fondness for children and helped to sustain families by visiting their cabins and reading the Bible to attentive frontier families.

The steroid-infused version of Jackson and his horse “Little Sorrel” on the Manassas Battlefield.

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Between May 13 and May 23, 2013, I co-taught a study tour of Civil War battlefields with a colleague. While this was the sixth time I have offered this study tour for undergraduate students, I decided at the outset that I would use this opportunity to gather information about orchards on Civil War battlefields. I was aware of the “famous” peach orchard where many men died on the field at Gettysburg, and was aware of a few other references to battlefield orchards, but was surprised at the abundance of information I uncovered on the eleven day trip. This is the first in a series of blog posts on battlefield orchards.

Joseph Sherfy, peach grower and minister in the Marsh Creek Church of the Brethren

Joseph Sherfy purchased land along the Emmitsburg Road, south of the town of Gettysburg, in 1842. Sherfy was a striver, and decades later his obituary declared that “he made out of sterile acres a most productive farm [and] deservedly stood in the front rank of intelligent and successful agriculturists.” Planting much of his land in peach trees, by the eve of the Civil War Joseph Sherfy’s peaches, which he sold fresh, dried, and canned, were locally famous, and his orchard appeared on an 1858 map of Adams county. The business supported Joseph, his wife Mary, and their six children.

When the Union army reached Gettysburg on the first of July 1863, Joseph Sherfy and his family were ready to help, providing water and bread to thirsty and hungry soldiers. The next day they were forced to evacuate their home, and did not return until the battle was over.

On days two and three of the battle, the Sherfy farm was in the midst of the conflict. A decision made by Union General Dan Sickles, against the orders of his commanding officer, ensured that Joseph Sherfy’s Peach Orchard would never be forgotten. Ordered to hold his men in a line that extended south of the town of Gettysburg to a hill called Little Round Top, Sickles’ decided instead to move his men forward to another spot of high ground in the middle of Sherfy’s orchard, a position he believed would be more defensible. By doing so, Sickles created a sharp bend in the line, a vulnerable “salient,” in the language of war, which could be attacked by the Confederate army from two sides. By the time Commanding General Meade realized what Sickles had done, easy retreat was not possible, and the soldiers in Sherfy’s Peach Orchard faced withering fire for several hours before those not killed were able to retreat. The fighting in and around the peach orchard salient is remembered as among the fiercest of the three day battle.

What the Sherfy’s found when they returned to their home after the battle surely disheartened them. Their barn had been burnt to the ground, the exterior of their home was riddled with bullets, and the interior had been ransacked by Confederate soldiers. The soils in the orchard and elsewhere on the farm had been hastily dug up, with the corpses of soldiers buried wherever they had fallen, while forty-eight dead horses remained strewn about the orchard, swelling and decomposing in the summer heat. The Sherfy’s estimated their losses as $2500, but like most residents of the village, were awarded little or no compensation from the government.

Yet the peach trees in the orchard where so many men and beasts fell, rattled by canister and rifle fire, mostly survived. In the ensuing years, Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard became a popular stop with returning veterans and curious visitors. Veterans shared their stories with the Sherfy’s and Mary Sherfy collected pictures of these men, displaying them on a wall in her home. Veterans of the battle, as well as tourists, were eager to view and touch a large cherry tree which stood alongside the Sherfy home, which had a 12 pound ball lodged deep within its trunk. “Soldiers and veterans saw trees (and their fragments) . . . as objects that provided access to the past, a vital link to the landscape of war they had created,” Mary Kate Nelson reminds us in Ruin Nation, her fascinating study of the war’s aftermath. Before they departed, both veteran and tourist to the Sherfy farm took away with them a souvenir of another sort–canned or dried peaches from the Sherfy’s surviving orchard.

Joseph Sherfy died in 1881, but his famous peach orchard survived him, and drew more visitors with each passing year. Just when and why the Sherfy orchards was uprooted I do not yet know. But for decades, the land remembered for the bloody fighting at “the peach orchard,” contained no peach trees at all.

The new Sherfy orchard at dawn, May 2013

The battle of Gettysburg was waged on the many family farms which surrounded the village, and most of these farms had orchards in 1863. The Sherfy’s peach orchard is the most remembered of these, but all across the battlefield, soldiers sought shelter from unrelenting fire beneath the trunks of fruit trees. In recent years the National Parks Service has begun an effort to restore many of its preserved battlefields to their condition on the eve of the battles fought there. In line with those efforts, the NPS has

T-shirts, peach taffy, and aprons, adorned with the Sherfy Peach Orchard logo, are now for sale at the Gettysburg Visitors Center.

partnered with local volunteer organizations to replant and maintain many of the fruit orchards which dotted the landscape of war. Gettysburg National Battlefield Park has perhaps done more than any other battlefield, and today dozens of young orchards are rising out of Gettysburg’s soils. New orchards also appear on the Trostle and Rose farms, adjacent to the Sherfy’s Emmitsburg Road farm. Many of the Confederate soldiers who assaulted Sherfy’s Peach Orchard did so from the Rose Farm’s apple orchard, which witnessed destruction as bad or worse than that inflicted upon the Sherfy Orchard. One early postwar visitor to the Rose farm declared that “No one farm on all the widely extended battlefield probably drank as much blood as did the Rose farm.”

William Kerrigan is the Cole Distinguished Professor of American History at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio and the author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard. He is currently working on orchards in American History. Other posts in this series on Civil War Battlefield Orchards include:

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Between May 13 and May 23, 2013, I co-taught a study tour of Civil War battlefields with a colleague. While this was the sixth time I have offered this study tour for undergraduate students, I decided at the outset that I would use this opportunity to gather information about orchards on Civil War battlefields. I was aware of the “famous” peach orchard where many men died on the field at Gettysburg, and was aware of a few other references to battlefield orchards, but was surprised at the abundance of information I uncovered on the eleven day trip. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on battlefield orchards.

The new Sherfy orchard at dawn, May 2013

It was about six days into my eleven day Civil War study tour that I realized that replanting orchards at historical parks had become something of a movement. It wasn’t that I was completely unaware of this. I had read Susan Dolan’s excellent Fruitful Legacy: A Historic Context of Orchards in the United States, which catalogues historic orchards at National Parks sites and also offers a nice historical overview of orchard agriculture in America. I was aware that the Gettysburg National Military Park had replanted the historic Sherfy Orchard. But as we visited one Civil War site after another, and my students rolled their eyes each time I asked a ranger or interpreter about orchards at that particular place, I was happily surprised at how many of them were planning or already in the process of restoring historic orchards.

Heritage Apple Orchard at Belle Grove Plantation

Gettysburg has replanted dozens of orchards on their historic sites, and now that they have removed the old Cyclorama building, they intend to replant a historic orchard on that site as well. The oldest trees in Antietam’s restored Piper Orchard are now more than ten years old. The privately-run Belle Grove Plantation on the Cedar Creek battlefield now has a small orchard, of heritage apples and is also keeping honeybees.

Young peach tree in front of Grant’s Cabin, City Point

At Grant’s Headquarters at City Point on the James River, which had been the Richard Eppes plantation before the war, a few fruit trees have been replanted on the grounds. More significantly, the National Parks Service commissioned a study by the Olmsted Foundation which scoured sketches and paintings of the Eppes Plantation, Richard Eppes’ diaries and account books at the Virginia Historical Society, as well as the letters and diaries of other visitors to the plantation just before or during the time it served as Grant’s headquarters to determine what Eppes planted and where. They are using that study as a blueprint for a gradual restoration of Eppes’ original landscaping, which included a wide range of fruit trees scattered about the property.

Irvin McDowel went 0-2 at Manassas. But he loved the local apples.

Nonetheless, it is easier to decide to restore orchards on historic sites, than it is to actually succeed in these efforts. Our National Parks have been starved for funding for years, and the current sequester will only make an already tight situation tighter. Privately funded sites like Belle Grove also struggle to meet their payrolls. While visiting the Manassas National Battlefield Park, I was delighted to learn that at least one orchard was mentioned in the story of the Battle of Second Manassas, and that Park Service staff had made some effort to replant trees on the Brawner Farm. It was under the branches of the Brawner apple orchard that the hapless but always hungry Ohio General Irvin McDowell spread out his maps and ate “apples by the basket” as he tried to figure out what his Confederate foes were up to.

Deer have made quick work of the netting at Manassas

When I arrived at the Brawner Farm, however, I was disappointed with what I found. In the middle of a pasture of waist-high grass resided a motley collection of young apple trees, each surrounded by not-so-sturdy deer fence, many of them collapsed in on the trees. I strode into the wet grass to get a closer look, and found several trees completely entangled in the collapsed deer netting, some of them having been in that condition long enough that they were now growing sideways. While I didn’t hold out much hope for these trees, I couldn’t leave without making some effort to rescue them, carefully untangling the netted trees while my bemused but patient students waited along a dry path some yards away.

At the Shirley plantation, staff recently planted one peach, one apple, one plum, and one cherry tree where an orchard once stood. Hope they are self-fertile varieties!

In the interpretive center at the Brawner Farm, one ranger expressed skepticism about the whole project. The farmhouse that the interpretive center occupies was itself a post-war construction, albeit on the site of an earlier farmhouse that resided on roughly the same footprint. If the very farmhouse itself was not the same as the one that was there in the midst of the battle, he asked me, what value was there in trying to replant a historic orchard on the site? Was this taking the desire to restore battlefields to their precise pre-battle condition a bit too far?

Given what I know about the effort and resources it takes to care for an orchard—and to protect them from the ravages of deer, insects, and harmful diseases and fungi—I had to conceded that this might not be the wisest use of scarce park resources. At Gettysburg and elsewhere, success in these efforts came only when the historic site found committed and knowledgeable volunteers willing to take responsibility for the trees. I can’t fault the over-stretched staff of Manassas National Battlefield Park for neglect, and instead I applaud their intention. It is my hope that they can find a group of committed volunteers to take over this project. And they will need to invest in some more substantial deer fence.

Volunteers for the Philly Orchard Project.

These local volunteer organizations might learn a great deal by looking at the efforts of Urban Orchard organizations around the country, which would no doubt be great resources for them. These include groups like the Philadelphia Orchard Project, Seattle’s City Fruit, the Portland Fruit Tree Project, the Boston Tree Party, and Los Angeles’ Fallen Fruit collective. These organizations have learned a great deal about the pitfalls and promise of planting and maintaining public orchards. I hope that efforts to replant orchards on federal, state, and private historic sites continues to grow, and am eager to learn about other efforts out there. Please let me know about other efforts by contributing a comment below.